Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Author/journalist/translator
Marc Vincenz has been lauded across the board for every poetry
collection he's produced, and the accolades spill over into his fifth
collection, Beautiful Rush(copyright 2014 Unlikely Books),
which has been described by his poetic peers as “spellbinding,”
“one of the finest poets of his generation,” and “hard-won and
believable.” With those kind of credentials, one might either be
too intimidated or too turned off to read Vincenz's latest literary
offering.

Don't
let the tsunami of praise dissuade you. Beautiful Rush
recounts one brave poet's journey into “terra incognita,” that
unknown territory that is humanity's deep well of shared unconscious.
On the surface. many of the poems in Beautiful Rush come off
as decisive moments captured in time, ala an Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph. But there is so much more going on in every one of these
gorgeous poems. Vincenz, with an adept combination of contemporary
language and classic archetypes, pulls back the veil of ubiquity to
show the reader - through a poet's vision and voice - the strange,
beautiful worlds and wisdom within ourselves we choose not to
acknowledge, yet need to recognize for our own survival, as in the
poem “Cassandra's Smoke”:

That foul breath of the city

waters
the eye,

but the nose,

self-assured,
carries on—

embracing
whatever

comes
its way:

sweat,

perfume,

fungal
spores lofted over

mountain
ranges

in
puffed up storm clouds,

jagged
desert-dust,

bits
of life dredged up.

Still,

the
megaphone urges you to waltz

to
pass the long-short-long time

in
a park,

where old fools battle

crickets and compare

bird feathers,

where
dogs shit and rut,

where
artists seek the ears

of
trees and pansies

and
crumbling brick—

but
a riptide

of
taxis and buses burns carbon dioxide

through
your arteries,

you
hear voices

in
hard labor,

and
behind closed rooms,

you
hear something

like
knowledge,

clearing its throat.

In
reading Beautiful Rush, Vincenz's choice of archetypal
delivery, aka Cassandra, the doomed prophetess of fallen Troy, is
particularly well-chosen. Cassandra was a priestess of Apollo who was
endowed with the gift of prophecy, but was doomed to never be
believed. Throughout Homer's Iliad, Cassandra's repeated
fervent warnings are rejected by her fellow Trojans, who dismiss her
as insane. Much to their collective folly, they paid the ultimate
price. Vincenz, in the role of Cassandra cum poet, outlines the
visions of a 21st Century world at a crossroads, one that
would do well to listen to the warnings lost amidst the increasing
noise of technology and progress. And in this, Vincenz-Cassandra not
only serves as a means of prophecy, but as a guide and a vehicle of
rebirth/reaffirmation of identity, as in the poem, “Cassandra's
Level-headed Company”:

Knowing
the stars

gave
her a sense

of
reality.

Knowing
less

than
what she knew

others
had, gave her

a
sense of place.

She
needed means

to
believe

and
to doubt.

And
through a riddle

when
in doubt,

when
standing alone

at
rebellion,

even
careless

wisdom
had to go.

To
be one

of
the lingering

‘wicked’
ones,

to
be sealed

in
an icy fate.

What
is it really

to
be honest?

I
choose

what
governs

the
syntax

within
this level-headed

company.

We
live in a world that, for all intents and appearances, is on the
verge of repeating its most heinous historical mistakes. Marc
Vincenz, with his book, Beautiful Rush, has provided an essential road map to navigate our way through an increasingly unknown and
troubled time.